It was Sinclair Davidson who told me - the other night, on Facebook - that Adam Smith is buried in Edinburgh. The instructions Sinkers gave me (via the Adam Smith Institute) for finding his grave were wonderfully poetic but not especially clear:
The Smith monument will be in line of sight of the recent statue of Smith’s friend David Hume, and will look downhill to the Canongate (where Smith is buried), towards the harbour of Leith (with its connotations of trade and commerce), and over the sea to the County of Fife, where Smith was born.
Thereby, of course, hangs a tale.
I decided to go hunting for his grave, take a few pictures and return with a pleasant story of new discoveries made in the course of my travels. I learned a little more than I expected, though, as well as a lesson about the way capitalism (as opposed to socialism) views its noble dead.
Adam Smith is buried in the Canongate Kirk, in the heart of Medieval Edinburgh. For a long time his grave was unknown and neglected, until a Scots-American businessman, appalled by the contrast between Karl Marx’s well-tended grave in London and Smith’s untidy plot in Edinburgh, decided to fund some renovations. The story is a peculiarly libertarian one, in that no state expenditure was needed, although at one point, the state did manage to impede the efforts of private individuals.
Mr Lamond’s interest in the grave came after he read an article in a business magazine during the mid-nineties contrasting the state of Smith’s dilapidated tomb in Edinburgh with the well-kept grave of socialist philosopher Karl Marx in London.
“I was amazed to read this,” explained Mr Lamond, 61, a regular visitor to the Capital since he moved to Canada in 1965. “The contribution that Smith made to the world should be recognised”.
“A number of years ago I offered to put up a plaque and now we have arrived at this which, seeing it all finished today, makes me very proud. I think the combination of the flagstone and the guiding markers will help bring a greater number of visitors to the kirk”.
However, the initial response to Bob Lamond’s offer of £10,000 was not particularly enthusiastic, as an earlier piece in The Scotsman makes clear.
Despite being considered one of the greatest figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith’s grave lies virtually forgotten. The neglect has been branded a disgrace by his followers, who say the burial site is of international interest.
Last year, a Canada-based multi-millionaire’s offer to pay for a £10,000 renovation around Adam Smith’s Edinburgh grave was knocked back by heritage chiefs.
Edinburgh-born oil tycoon Bob Lamond offered the cash to pay for signs which would pinpoint the world-famous Scot’s resting place within the Canongate Kirkyard.
But his offer was turned down by city council heritage officials after objections were raised by Historic Scotland. The national watchdog has the right to veto changes in the graveyard, which has listed status.
Then the Adam Smith Institute got in on the act, offering to fund a statue in the Royal Mile to (arguably) Scotland’s most influential son. The statue was supposed to be completed this summer, but there’s no sign of it apart from some large blue boxes and scaffolding outside St Giles’ Kirk. That said, the Cato Institute has now started to involve itself, so it may be that the statue (which has already been designed and cast) will go up sooner rather than later. As of June 2005,
A year into the effort, it has raised about two-thirds of the $407,000 cost of casting and maintaining the statue, according to Steve Bettison, general manager of the institute. Contributions have come from individuals all over the world. (…)
Mr. Bettison said he can think of only two other statues of Smith in Britain - one in a Glasgow museum and the other in a backstreet in London. The disparate treatment of Smith and Marx, says the proprietor of tomgpalmer.com, arises because “Marx created a cult, but Smith stimulated people to think.” Smith based his work not on his own personality but on the observation of truths of human nature that Marx was never able to plumb.
Although there’s no statue as yet, Bob Lamond’s efforts at the Canongate site, while subdued, are in excellent taste and - as Sinkers originally pointed out - the view from Canongate down the Royal Mile is a superb one, and does bring trade to mind.
I’ve included a graphic of the view down the hill, but a complete set of images taken during my Smith researches is available here.
12 Comments
Great story, great photos too. You did well to get the whole history. Adam Smith is honored in Wallace’s Tower (over in Stiring) where on one of the floors they have busts of great Scotsman, including Hume, Smith, Lord Kame etal.
I saw and read the first chapter of a very interesting and newish book about the Scottish enlightenment. Apparently it had it’s roots in the oppressive Scottish Nationalist Kirk. The first chapter had a schoolboy hung because he was so clever enough to question scripture with good authority. I beleive he was tried by the Scottish Advocate General. Name of the book anyone?
That book is by Arthur Herman and is called ‘How the Scots invented the modrn world‘.
The Scots gave us Adam Smith (who killed mercantilism), David Hume (who killed induction), James Watt and James Clerk Maxwell (who helped usher in the Steam Age and the Electrical Age respectively). Pretty good record for a bunch of kilt wearing, whisky drinking highlanders.
If you’d read Herman’s book you’d know that they were claret drinking. Whiskey was the moonshine of the day and only barbarians and highlinders drank it. Civilised Scots drank claret. It was only during the Napoleonic wars when French claret became scarce that low-landers started dring whiskey. That, of course, explains why the ‘oldest’ scotch whiskeys all originate in the 19th century and not earlier.
Jason,
All of those you mentioned were lowlanders (Edinburgh and Glasgow) and I doubt any of them would have ever worn a kilt - except maybe as an affectation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Highlands_lowlands.png
The whisky on the other hand…
The wikipedia says the Phylloxera beetle played its part too.
Thanks Helen, great stuff (again)!
Arthur Herman gave a talk at CIS about the slightly different line taken by the leading thinkers at the three main cities in Scotland. He also reported that James Cook was the son of a ploughman, one of the reliable and hardworking Presbyterians who moved south to work in England. The Cook family cottage has been dismantled and rebuilt in a Melbourne park.
Suri Ratnapala used to put Hume first drop in his all time greatest philosophers First XI. He certainly did for inferring values from facts… and thus the whole basis of natural law.
Hume has a lovely statue in the Royal Mile; I’m looking forward to seeing Smith’s once it’s complete. About the only sour note is the hideously ugly Parliament building down the bottom of the hill near Holyrood House. Quite a few Scots I’ve encountered have invited random tourists to, ahem, drop explosives on it.
What is this about inferring values from facts? Hume was one of the first to demonstrate that you can’t get from an “is” to an “ought” and that is the end of natural law.
The structure of that demonstration is the same as his refutation of induction: from an “is” (an observation statement) you can’t logically get to a general scientific law.
I would have Kant and Hume in the second row of my rugby (league) team with Mises and Popper in the front row and Percy Shelley locking the scrum. Adam Smith at full back.
Arrrgh, Rafe - not being clear (blogging while sleepy again). I meant to convey that, but it didn’t come across clearly.
As to the Marx gravesite, my recollection is that the (ghastly, overblown) bust was funded by the Bulgarian government. So the British taxpayers have been spared expenditure there.
That said, HIghgate Cemetary is a particularly pleasant place to stroll around. I once read the Communist Manifesto there. It’s a beautifully-written piece of prose, regardless of what you think of its contents. If only Marx & Engels could’ve retained their pithy tone in subsequent writings.
Enjoy Edinburgh.